2020 Election Night Hub

This page contains live results for Pennsylvania. My goal is not to predict the winner of the state. In fact, it’s the opposite. My goal is to understand where the tallied votes are from, where the untallied votes are from, and encourage caution in making assumptions on incomplete data.

There are three categories of ballot: in-person, mail-in that has already been received (“returned”), and mail-in that has not yet been received (“outstanding”). Any ballot postmarked by 11/3 and received by 11/6 will be counted (unless the Supreme Court interferes). Counted Votes include all in-person and an unknown proportion returned mail-ins.*

WARNING: It is unclear how many, if any, of the Uncounted Mail might be rejected. Also, I do not know how many provisional ballots there are, but they will slowly appear in the Counted Votes.

Updated 1:16 AM

Methodology and Definitions (Important)

Counted Votes: The current total votes for each candidate. These are from electionreturns.pa.gov, and include results from an unknown number of precincts.

Uncounted Mail-Ins*: An estimate of the votes from returned mail-in ballots left to count. For counties with at least 1000 mail-in votes counted, this is each candidate’s current county-level percentage among the mail-ins times the number of returned-but-uncounted mail-in ballots. For counties with fewer than 1000, this is just the number of returned-but-uncounted mail-ins by party registration.

Remaining Live Votes (second-to-top bar): This is a super naive allocation of votes in the precincts that haven’t yet reported. The PA data does not show how many precincts have reported from a given county. So I take the 2016 turnout, apply a multiplier, and subtract the current vote total. That multiplier starts at 1.0 but will change through the night. Remaining Live Votes serves only as an order of magnitude. Do not trust it. Just wait. (Update: I have zeroed this out.)

Outstanding Mail-Ins (top bar): This is the number of mail-in ballots that have not been marked received yet. Ballots received through 11/6 will be counted, unless the Supreme Court interferes. (Update: I have zeroed this out.)

Data Sources
Live results from electionreturns.pa.gov. (Updated 2020-11-14 01:16:47)
Mail-in data from data.pa.gov. (Updated 2020-11-05 04:51:09)

Philadelphia Maps

Data represents current reported results as of 11/14 01:16 AM. Turnout is defined as total votes for President.

Below is the turnout as percent of active registered voters. I don’t love using this; the denominator is way too big.

State Maps

County-Level Results

State Maps of Change in Current Results from 2016

State Map of Change in Turnout from 2016

Scatters of Change

Results can change in two ways from 2016: either turnout in a county changed or preferences did. Below I decompose those changes. (I don’t have voter-level changes, obviously, so some of what I call “preference changes” could be within-county differential turnout.)

Mail-In Map